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With their back against the wall, Comcast is pulling out it’s well manicured, sharp claws in Fort Collins, Colorado. Voters will be asked to approve measure 2B on November 7th, which would allow the city to take steps toward establishing their own municipal telecommunications utility. In order to preserve the lack of competition, incumbent Internet access providers are on track to spending more during this election than has been spent on any other issue in Fort Collins’ history.

Behind The Name Of "Citizen"

As we’ve come to see time and again, when a local community like Fort Collins takes steps to invest in the infrastructure they need for economic development, incumbents move in to prevent municipal efforts. Comcast and CenturyLink aren’t offering the types of connectivity that Fort Collins wants to progress, so the city has decided to ask the voters whether or not they feel a publicly owned broadband utility will meet their needs.

In keeping with the usual modus operandi, out of the woodwork emerge lobbying groups that not-so-artfully mask incumbents like Comcast and CenturyLink. These groups are able to contribute large sums of money to whatever organization has been established, often in the form of a “citizens group,” to bombard local media with misinformation about municipal networks to try to convince voters to vote against the initiative. In Fort Collins, the “citizens group” happens to call itself Priorities of Fort Collins (PFC).

A closer look at who is funding PFC’s website and professional videos takes one to the recently filed campaign report. The City Clerk’s Office has a copy of this document on file and shows that PFC has only three contributors, none of whom are individual “citizens” but are associated with big telecom:

$125,000 from the Colorado Cable Telecommunications Association (CCTA): This organization was the same mask Comcast used back in 2011 when it spent approximately $300,000 to stop a similar effort...

Earlier this spring, Sun Prairie Utilities (SPU) and TDS Telecommunications Corp. signed a letter of intent to transfer ownership of the community’s Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) network to TDS. After weighing the pros and cons, the City Council approved the deal by a 4 - 2 vote at an April 11th meeting.

Conversation and Reservations

TDS will pay $2.88 million for the fiber-optic network. The asset has been valued at $2.7 - $2.8 million and the city owes $2.85 million on the network.

The company has agreed to expand the network over the next 30 months and will use customer demand to determine where to deploy new investment. If they don’t begin expansion within 30 months, TDS will pay a $25 per unit penalty to the city.

At least one Alderman felt the penalty was too lenient. “I want this contract to have real consequences if the buildout doesn’t happen like they say it will,” said Mike Jacobs at the April 11th meeting. Jacobs expressed his desire to allow SPU to continue efforts to develop the network, arguing that high-speed Internet access is an essential service like police, fire, and other services the city typically provides. He argued such an asset should not be sold to a company that needs to make profits.

Alder Maureen Crombie also wanted to hold off on approving the transaction. She stated that the Council should wait three weeks to hear residents concerns but other council members disagreed.

Incumbent Charter Communications also opposed the sale, stating that they face unfair competition now because the city will be helping TDS market the FTTH service. Alders responded to Charter’s government affairs manager by reminding him that Sun Prairie had approached the company asking for upgrades but were ignored. They also said that, had Charter offered to purchase the system, Sun Prairie officials would have considered their offer.

Important Details

Under the agreement, reported the city’s attorney, the city will share revenue with TDS based on penetration rates. As long as subscribership is 25 percent or higher within certain areas, revenue sharing can be up to 7.5 percent. Revenue sharing will occur for the first five years after the transfer of assets. The...

In Wisconsin, Sun Prairie Utilities (SPU) and TDS Telecommunications Corp. have signed a letter of intent (LOI) for the sale of the city’s municipal network to the Chicago-based telecommunications company. The parties plan on having a final deal hashed out and concluded by the end of March.

TDS Plans For Growth

According to Sun Prairie Mayor Paul Esser, approximately 700 homes are connected to the SPU network, leaving 12,000 households left to be hooked up. TDS has expressed a desire to accelerate the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) expansion, in keeping with its recent growth strategy.

TDS has also recently acquired Interlinx Communications and its subsidiary Tonaquint Networks in southern Utah.

Sun Prairie Residents, Businesses Not Happy With Incumbents

About a year ago, we learned that an FTTH pilot project had experienced incredibly high demand: 54 percent of households in the pilot area requested the service. It was a good problem to have, but perhaps the community's leaders got cold feet. The demand for high-quality Internet access is strong in Sun Prairie where residents are fed up with poor service from Charter and Frontier. Enter TDS.

What The Future Holds

Will TDS be able to do a better job? Will TDS maintain the assets or sell out to some other behemoth like Comcast? Time will tell. Whether or not TDS will encourage the current providers to improve services or just offer another poor option to the people of Sun Prairie remains to be seen.

On the plus side, if Sun Prairie had not chosen to make any investment in Internet...

In 2010, the Minnesota legislature set a goal for 2015 - universal access to high speed broadband throughout the state. Even though we have the technology to make that vision a reality, large swaths of the state will not meet that goal. Nevertheless, local folks who have chosen to take control of their connectivity are finding a way to exceed expectations, surpassing the choices in many metropolitan regions.

Some of the communities we cover include:

Windom, which is one of the most advanced networks in the state, built their own network after their telephone company refused to invest in their community.

Dakota County showed how a coordinated excavation policy can reduce by more than 90 percent the cost of installing fiber.

Lac qui Parle County partnered with a telephone cooperative to bring high speed broadband to its most sparsely population communities.

We delved into networks in Anoka, Carver, Cook, Lake, and Scott Counties. The report also shares developments in the municipalities of Chaska, Buffalo, and Monticello. We tell the story of RS Fiber, located in Sibley and part of Renville County. These communities provide examples of municipal networks, a variety of public private partnerships, and "dig once" policies.

This week in Minnesota, the governor’s office began accepting applications for the state’s new $20 million initiative Border-to-Border program. We hope this new report will serve as a resource for potential applicants and other community leaders across the U.S. interested in taking charge of their broadband destinies.

Monticello Minnesota may be located 40 miles outside Minneapolis, but it is the center of the planet when it comes to FTTH competition. We have tried and cannot identify another community localed on planet earth with two separate FTTH networks going head to head across the entire community.

Short explanation for how Monticello came to be unique in having two FTTH networks: Monticello had poor Internet access from Charter and telephone company TDS. Each refused to invest after local businesses and elected officials implored for better networks. Monticello started building its own FTTH network (Monticello FiberNet) and TDS sued to stop the project while suddenly decided to upgrade its slow DSL to fiber. Lawsuit was tossed out and Monticello finished its network.

In most community fiber networks, the DSL provider seems to fade away because it cannot offer the fast speeds of fiber or cable, so the market basically remains a duopoly with the community network replacing the telephone company (which continues to offer cheap, slow DSL to a small number of customers). But in Monticello, Charter and TDS engaged in a price war, which has really hurt the City's ability to generate enough revenue to pay its debt.

Price wars are very hard on new market entrants because they have to amoritze the cost of their investment whereas the incumbents often have already done so. This means incumbents can almost always offer lower prices if they are determined to do so.

In many communities, we have lacked clear evidence of predatory pricing - that is pricing below the actual cost of service to run competitors out of business. This would violate federal law (if any agency bothered to enforce it)....

Since then, Gigabit Squared and Monticello decided against a partnership and the City ceased making payments to bondholders. Previously, the City had covered the difference between revenues and debt payments by borrowing from the City's liquor store fund, a municipal enterprise fund.

Monticello had financed the network with unbacked revenue bonds, meaning investors understood from the start that the full faith and credit of taxpayers would not "make them whole" in the event that the network did not create the revenues necessary to pay back the bond. Because Monticello chose that financing method, it had to pay a higher interest rate - those who buy bonds understand the differences in risk with different types of bonds and rates.

However, the City has been negotiating with bondholders for a settlement to avoid potential lawsuits over the telecom utility and because this is a typically what how these situations are worked out. Bondholders will "take a haircut" in the parlance of finance rather than risk a total loss.

This means that Monticello will own and continue to operate FiberNet Monticello. It also means that rather than having a network financed by revenue bonds, the network will have benefited from City funds from the liquor store and will almost certainly be re-financed with other City funds. Monticello could issue a bond for the new $5.75 million but to my knowledge, no one has suggested that.

Monticello faced a number of key decision moments throughout the history of its FiberNet. Given the recent changes in management and decision not to make up the different between debt service and revenues, some may be wondering if proceeding with FiberNet was the smart decision.

It was 2008 and the economy hadn't entered its death spiral. Monticello had overwhelmingly voted by a 3:1 margin for the local government to bond for and build the network.

When Monticello was beginning to sell its bonds, the incumbent telephone company (TDS) filed a lawsuit against the City, with the extremely dubious claim that Monticello did not have the authority to do what other cities in Minnesota had done. Courts later tossed it, finding that the TDS suit had no merit and making TDS reimburse Monticello for some of its costs due to the frivolous suit.

But the goal was never to win the lawsuit, it was to delay and harass. Monticello had to wait a year to begin building its network. Though TDS had previously maintained that its DSL was just fine for the needs of residents and busineses, it began pulling permits to significantly upgrade its DSL to a FTTH product. (TDS has steadfastly maintained, while investing more in Monticello than any other Minnesota community, that community networks result in less investment from incumbents.)

At any rate, Monticello had a decision. It faced an expensive court case and the City's action was apparently driving TDS to improve its poor network. Monticello could have backed down in the face of TDS' bullying.

And if it had? From what we have seen elsewhere, this is our best guess:

TDS could have delayed its upgrades or changed its mind entirely when the economy tanked. If it continued with upgrades, it would likely have made some token investments but not lowered its prices because the threat of actual competition was removed. It certainly wouldn't have unveiled broadband tiers that were superior on speed and price to those in Minneapolis / St Paul metro area.

If they had unveiled a high-speed option like the 50/20 Mbps package, they likely would have priced it sufficiently high that few took it and then would have used that as...

City administrator Jeff O'Neill said that the city has no intention of abandoning FiberNet's 1,700 customers, including about 130 businesses.

"This system isn't going anywhere," he said. "We're not going out of business."

Despite the problems, he said the city has one of the fastest Internet systems in the country that has driven down prices and improved services by providing competition.

The article also notes that prior to the City-owned network, the telephone company (TDS) provided very poor DSL service that was harming area businesses with slow and very unreliabile phone and broadband services. Without FiberNet Monticello, we don't know how many businesses would have been forced to relocate to be competitive in the digital economy.

We decided to dig a little deeper to get a sense of what Monticello has received for its investment and difficulty. We previously examined the prices charged by Charter cable in town and found that households taking that deal were saving $1000/year.

We also noted that Charter was almost certainly engaging in predatory pricing. After talking with other networks, we would guess that Charter is losing between $30 and $50 (conservatively) per subscriber per...

In a surprise move, HBC has announced it will end management of FiberNet Monticello, though the actual time frame has not been announced. FiberNet Monticello is a FTTH network approximately 45 miles northwest of Minneapolis. HBC has been operating the publicly owned network, offering triple play services, since inception.

FiberNet Monticello has had a particularly rough road since citizens overwhelmingly voted to build it to create a locally owned alternative to cableco Charter and incumbent telco TDS. TDS landed the first blow against the network with a frivolous lawsuit. Though the courts tossed it out, the proceedings took a year and slightly added to the interest rate Monticello had to pay on its debt.

Throughout it all, the City and HBC worked together to deliver the best broadband and customer service in the area. However, the network has not met its revenue targets (largely due to time lost from the lawsuit) and that has led to discussions about how to ensure the network would become financially self-sufficient as rapidly as possible.

HBC's performance in Monticello has actually been impressive given the anti-competitive tactics of Charter and TDS. If you want to know why we have no cable or broadband competition in America, look no further than the refusal of state and federal agencies to investigate predatory pricing tactics used to deny subscribers to FiberNet Monticello.

Regardless, elected officials in Monticello were not happy with the status quo (covering FiberNet shortfalls from the liquor store fund) and new management will offer an opportunity to chart a new course. Though HBC has decided to withdraw, FiberNet Monticello retains most of its staff and may even be better motivated to meet this challenge. From the City's press release (also below in full):

The City of Monticello would like to express appreciation to HBC for the key role they played in successfully developing and delivering high quality and reliable video, voice and internet service to the community. The HBC legacy in Monticello includes the development of a well-trained FiberNet Monticello staff and the establishment of a strong and loyal customer base, which...

When Monticello, Minnesota, decided to build its community fiber network -- Fibernet Monticello -- it expected the incumbents to lower their prices and fight to keep subscribers. But Monticello had no idea the lengths to which they would go.

Charter has taken a package for which it charges $145/month in Rochester, Duluth, Lakeville, and nearby Buffalo (MN) and is offering it for $60/month - price guaranteed for 2 years. A Monticello resident supplied us with this flyer, which this person had received multiple times at their home over the course of a month. (See below for the full flyer).

This is either predatory pricing or the cable industry is out of control with its rate increases. If that package costs Charter more than $60/month to supply, then it is engaging in predatory pricing to drive competitors out of the market. Consider that Charter may be taking a loss of $20/month ($240/year) from each household that takes this offer. They can do that by cross-subsidizing from nearby markets where they face...

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In eras past, economic success depended on creating networks that could shift people, merchandise and electric power as efficiently and as widely as possible. Today’s equivalent is broadband: the high-speed internet service that has become as vital a tool for producers and distributors of goods as it is for people plugging into all the social and cultural opportunities offered by the web. Easy access to cheap, fast internet services has become a facilitator of economic growth and a measure of economic performance.